Tuesday, April 6, 2010

"Ignite Where" Rocks!

If you have not heard about ignite before, check out this previous post.

Having attended a few Ignite events in Sydney and Perth, I thought it would be nice to try my hand at presenting here. It provided a comfortable and relatively neutral, opportunity to try out one of my favourite soap box topics: is the surveying industry stimulating or instead holding back innovation in spatial information in Australia? Judge for yourself here.

Other than mine, there were no fewer than another 13 Ignite presentations in San Jose that evening. Without fail, they were inspiring, humbling or outright exceptional. You can check them all out here.

These are my favourites.

Inspiring: Jonathan Stark's case against Apple's App Store, in which he argues its proprietary and commercial nature is stifling innovation.

Humbling: Ushahidi's Patrick Meier on how people all over the world joined forces to support the search & rescue teams in Haiti with crowdsourced geo-information, actually saving lives! Keep an eye out for Patrick, we will be welcoming him to Australia in July.

Exceptional: Open Source guru Paul Ramsey's very original take on a well-known issue: we all know your data is not perfect, so be a man and fess up to it!